Director, mom bond on YouTube

Pat Seftel wouldn’t date Denzel Washington, but she’d like to have him over for coffee. She thinks Lena Dunham dresses like “an old lady on Coney Island.” She’d be happy to play mah-jongg with Barbara Walters. And if she got a tattoo, she’d put it “somewhere where nobody else could see it. It would be very small, and very feminine, maybe like a butterfly — tiny-weeny, as big as your thumbnail.”

But don’t ask where. “I don’t think I should tell you,” she informs her son, Josh — along with a couple thousand YouTube viewers — from her winter home in Sarasota, Fla. Late last year, Josh, a New York City filmmaker who grew up in Niskayuna, started shooting his long-distance webcam conversations with his mother, who summers up here and winters in Sarasota. The result is “My Mom on Movies,” a sweetly chatty web series showcasing a few minutes of mother-son bonding over movies, celebrities and whatnot from the news.

“She’s incredibly incisive,” says Josh Seftel, who directed the 2008 political satire “War, Inc.” “And her opinions are coming from sort of an unexpected, unassuming source — which I think is really refreshing. I think that her opinions are right up there with the best critics.”

In their 13-so-far episodes of “My Mom on Movies” (https://www.youtube.com/user/MyMomOnMovies), the dutiful son sits before a computer in his Manhattan office, lofting pop-cultural nuggets at his mother. Her kind, curious face, topped with short red hair, fills his 27-inch screen and sparks to life at every question, arched eyebrows ticking ever so slightly upward.

What does she think of Ben Affleck? (“Kinda cute.”) Seth MacFarlane’s cartoons? (“Nasty, offbeat and liked by everybody.”) Dick Clark? (“I actually met him. He was nice. I did dance. We wore skirts that had poodles on them.”) Lance Armstrong? (“The Madoff of the cycling world.”)

While chatting about the Golden Globes, she observes that Denzel is “not as handsome as he used to be,” a criticism she later softens with an offering of coffee and rugelach. “Would you go on a date with him?” Josh asks. “He’s married,” Pat says. “If he wasn’t?” Josh persists. “I don’t go out with younger men,” Pat declares. And that is definitively that.

Sometimes they stumble into unforeseen territory. The question “What are you doing right now?” prompts the news that mom’s been reading the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy by E.L. James. Which prompts a conversation about sadomasochism. Which sons do not normally discuss with their mothers. But Josh Seftel goes there, asking mom if she’s now interested in S and M. She is not: “I like a nice hug.”

Recalling this exchange, Seftel says she hadn’t exactly planned on discussing erotica with her 44-year-old son. “It was almost like talking to a friend,” says Seftel, 76, from her home in Niskayuna, where she’ll remain through the warm months. “And then I thought, ‘Oh, my God, where am I going with it?'”

The seeds for “My Mom on Movies” were planted back in the early 2000s, when some of Seftel’s early work — starting with “Taking on the Kennedys,” his 1996 documentary about a failed Rhode Island congressional campaign against Patrick Kennedy — was first released on DVD. Suddenly, he was asked to produce extras: “And one of the things that they would always ask for was a ‘making-of’ featurette. ‘Tell us how the films were made.’ And I was always sort of annoyed.”

He decided to interview his parents. “I’d sit them down and say, ‘Tell me about the film. What’d you think of it?’ And it ended up being really funny, because they would argue with each other.”

Josh Seftel’s father, Lee, taught at AlbanyMedicalCollege and was chief of obstetrics at EllisHospital for many years. “I’m making this up, but one out of four people were delivered by him. A lot of people. He delivered 10,000 babies.” That part he isn’t making up. “One day he and I sat down, and we calculated it — based on the number of years and the babies per year.”

Four years ago, Lee Seftel died. Take care of mom, he told his children. But Seftel’s sisters live in Bethesda, Md., and Northampton, Mass., and get-togethers were tough. “Our universe felt a little out of whack,” Josh Seftel says. “It was time to get it back in order.”

The agreed-upon solution: buy Mom an iPad. It seemed like a bad idea, as Pat Seftel had always loathed computers. But Josh flew down and gave his mother a crash course in iPad literacy, and she quickly took to the newfangled gizmo, using Face Time (which she calls “Face Lift”) to keep in touch with her far-flung brood. It’s been healing, he says.

Being partners on a joint creative venture only adds to the fun of gassing with mom. “We’re collaborators on a project.”

As for Pat Seftel, she admires his skills as an interviewer and doesn’t mind watching herself on screen, though she admits it’s all a little strange. “I laugh and I think, ‘Oh, I should have gone to the beauty parlor.’ ”

Fame is something she hasn’t yet adjusted to. “My new stardom? Oh, God. Well. I was a little surprised, a little bit embarrassed, actually,” she says. And maybe “stardom” is too big a word. “But when people tell me what they liked and all that, it makes me feel good. It makes me proud of my son.”

Is he a good son? “Ah, couldn’t be better!” she replies. “But he was even a good son before all of this. He’s a great kid.”